


To Live Without

by salienne



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bad Wolf Rose Tyler, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-27
Updated: 2012-09-27
Packaged: 2017-11-15 04:27:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salienne/pseuds/salienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Rose does not cry as her Doctor dies."</i>
</p><p>Rose Tyler is the Bad Wolf. She could snap every war in creation with her teeth. The question is—how does she stop?</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Live Without

Rose Tyler does not cry as her Doctor dies.

It was coming, of course—they both knew it, though the specifics were in doubt. It’s a Dalek in the end, still glistening from the days of Void travel. It’s a Dalek with damaged power reserves but a Dalek nevertheless, and when it shoots, the Doctor falls. The organs shut down slowly, in a half-Time Lord. The Doctor can only watch as the Dalek moves around him and prepares to sync with the controls that will set off a string of explosions large enough to devastate Western Europe.

Rose blows the Dalek up into tiny pieces. 

She wants to do it again, and again, and again. A small part of her snarls, _I can_.

\---

The Doctor lies on the floor of a quaking oil rig, four miles off-shore. A helicopter is on its way—one of those new high-speed models available only to the military or corporations.

“Rose, listen to me, you need to go. Soon as…” His body seizes. His eyes roll back. He comes to gasping. “You can’t stay like this.”

“I know.”

His head rests on her lap, and the grip on her arm is probably meant to be tight. She strokes his face.

“Find… You have the TARDIS, find him.”

“I can stop this.”

“No.” He tries to sit up, falls back again. “No.”

Rose wants to shut her eyes. She can feel the writhing of the gold inside her—close enough to touch, to use. She could burn herself on it and grip it anyway, she could rip it out and tear apart the universe. She could keep him here, forever. Anything she wants.

“I love you,” she whispers.

“Love you too. I can’t lose that.”

“Neither can I.”

“I’m selfish.”

She smiles, at a time like this and she smiles, and when his fingers touched her lips she grabs them and presses a kiss to his palm. 

“Git.”

His last word, perhaps his last thought, is, “Rose.”

She holds him then, for a while, holds a warm and pliant body as the world readies to break apart. She could die here. Probably not, but maybe.

Her earpiece crackles. 

“Rose.” Metal wings roar behind Jake’s voice. “Rose! Where are you? Get your arse up here.”

She sits with her Doctor. 

She screams.

Rose Tyler screams, and she holds the Doctor’s body so tightly her arms shake. “Doctor, I can’t carry you,” she murmurs against his skin. “Damn it, get up. Please, get up.”

Her lips touch his cheek and the light inside her flares, it grasps—and Rose shoves it back down. She keeps it shut up and muffled and muzzled. She gets up and she runs, and though the music sings, Rose Tyler gags her own throat. 

\---

Pete never gets the incident report.

“I quit.”

“Thought you might.”

The man who has become her father stands in his blue suit _(plain, no pin stripes, loose in the shoulders)_ and he hugs her. She holds him as tightly as she can.

\---

“Have you gone daft? Rose, you can’t just leave-”

“Mum. I’ve got to go.”

Ellie is four years, eight months, three weeks, one day old, and she pulls at her mother’s hand. She is always like this, pulling—towards the jam, the stove, the wires hooked to the console, her father’s collection of interesting chemicals. Her uncle is seven years older and has all the best toys and hiding places. Fully human he ages a bit faster physically, a bit slower mentally. So long as her mum or dad or gran or grandpa are there to watch her try and stick her fingers in every socket, Ellie is the happiest child in the world.

Rose kneels down. She puts her hands on Ellie’s shoulders, palms cupping the bone.

“You’ve got to be a big girl now, okay? Mummy loves you very much.”

Ellie shuffles her feet. “Mum, there’s pancakes.”

“Ellie, are you listening to me? You’ve got to be brave like I know you can. And I don’t wanna hear that you’ve been making a fuss for your gran and grandpa. No more pizza shoes. I’ll be back when I can.”

“ _Mum_.”

“Ellie.”

“Okay, okay.”

Rose looks into her daughter’s eyes, examines the brown as closely as she can until she’s staring at a face now gone, and she sits back on her haunches. She wants to keep her too badly, when she’s this close. 

“Remember to share, yeah?” Rose says. “That’s Tony’s breakfast.”

“I promise, mum.”

“Good.” She ruffles the hair—short and brown and gravity-defying. “Go on.”

Ellie runs across the entrance hallway and through the cavernous doorway of the dining room. Rose stands, and Jackie grabs hold of her arm.

“All right, okay. A month or two, yeah? A proper holiday. Pete and I can manage it. I’ll have Jenna whip up that pudding she likes, the one with the raisins and the Belgian chocolates. Remember last time she broke that mirror trying to climb to it? Nearly gave me a heart attack.” Jackie takes a breath. “Rose, when are you coming back?”

“I’ll visit when I can.”

“Sweetheart-” 

“I don’t have any gray hairs, mum.” She doesn’t rip her arm away so much as steps back, and Jackie lets her go. “Not one.”

“So? Neither do I, thank you very much. Lots of women don’t go gray till their forties. Fifties, even. Sixties!”

“You were 26. It was when you started bleaching your hair again. I thought you’d set the loo on fire.”

“I told you not to come in.”

Rose smiles, though it’s hardly genuine. Her mum is angry, and scared, and all those things Tyler women handle so poorly when it comes to family, and when Jackie speaks Rose is braced for it.

“A child needs her mother, Rose. A mother knows that. A real mother knows that. After losing her father, you can’t just abandon her.”

No, Rose thinks, she can’t. But when has that ever stopped her?

\---

On April 23rd, 2016, Rose Marion Tyler disappeared from the world just as quickly as she entered it. The papers ran features. _The Sun_ had her face on every cover for a month. For once, Jackie avoided reporters, and Pete held backroom talks with editors. No Torchwood access, no accountability—not until the scandal stopped.

It did, eventually.

Ellie Tyler grew up. 

\---

The chameleon circuit works on this TARDIS—one of the perks of growing a new one out of a piece of their original home. The Doctor said they could keep it that way, the perfect camouflage, but he wouldn’t look at her when he made the offer. He wandered around the console, flipping switches that didn’t do much of anything yet, and with every step she took toward him he all but skittered away.

She asked for the police box.

The police box was pink. 

Then it was green and, somewhere around the fifth planet, it turned itself baby blue. It darkened slowly. Once it hit the appropriate level of lawful accountability, it settled. For the most part, anyway.

She still has no idea how it works.

Rose starts with the lever he used to pull them into the Vortex. Something about “accelerated growth” and “the nascent formation of nonessential systems”—when it dematerializes, the TARDIS shakes like a snow globe, the grating clattering, wall screens shuddering, lawn chairs skidding around the room as if in an ice show.

At the moment, the TARDIS sits stubbornly, frustratingly still. 

Around her the walls stare off into the expanse of sky above planet Earth, pinpricks of stars and dying galaxies. Sometimes, the Doctor would point to a light in the sky. “Metropolis 1,” he’d say, or, “That one’s meant to have burned out a century ago! You have not lived, Rose Tyler, until you have tried the chocolate-butterscotch-creamsicle biscuits on Chai.”

Rose twists a dial beside the console screen, and she replaces the stars with clouds. 

None of the other switches do a damn thing.

“You’ll let me redecorate,” she mutters, though actually she was going for a nice boring blue, “but you won’t go anywhere.”

Tugging the lever again accomplishes nothing—the TARDIS doesn’t budge. Rose circles the console, running her fingers over haphazardly arranged buttons and switches and only one rubber band. She pushes something here, flips something there. The TARDIS remains stationary in the bedroom of their flat.

She sighs. “I know. I miss him too.”

Closing her eyes, Rose touches the core of gold inside her. The TARDIS jumps.

The Doctor thought that, by growing to maturity in another universe, the TARDIS would learn to feed off of the unfamiliar energy. It didn’t need to. 

Rose got tired a lot, in the TARDIS.

Now the walls tremble and the floor panels clatter. The controls are hot and useless beneath her fingers and she can’t help it—she laughs. The ship rumbles to life around her, throws her against the controls once, twice, but it’s _moving_. It feeds off of her, runs through her, and if she closes her eyes it’s almost like the Doctor is there beside her. It’s almost like everything is all right.

The TARDIS jerks to a stop and Rose falls to the ground. She coughs, pushing herself up. She walks to the doors. Rose takes a breath, and she pushes them open.

The Vortex is cold and shimmers against her skin. It tints the world blue and sends her head spinning. Without that invisible barrier, she would be sucked into eternity.

“Right.”

Rose shuts the doors, and she turns back to the console. There is no rotor anymore. The console stops as if a woodcutter took an axe to it, but God help her if she ever set her tea down on the new tabletop. It was disrespectful, possibly even a worse offense than using the last of the hair gel. She can still remember the Doctor’s horrified expression, the heat of the cup jammed back into her fingers. Sometimes it feels empty all the way to the ceiling. 

_(Now what?)_

\---

Rose finishes the milk. 

The pizza could be a day or a decade old, and pickles and bread do in a pinch. She avoids the condensed milk and sardines because, ew, but also because Ellie had those together once and _liked_ it, and there are certain memories that hurt for more reasons than one. She reads, the library new and unfinished but just as endless as ever, and she holds her breath in the pool until her lungs burn. For a moment, the world sings.

The controls are useless.

Underneath the console, it seems like there are more wires than ever. She lies on her back with the gray metal panel on the grating beside her, and tweezers lie forgotten on her stomach. There is a wrench nearby, though Rose has no idea what she would do with it, even if there were bolts. Slowly, she raises her hand. Static fizzes across her palm. Just slightly, the green wire floats up. She tries it with another wire, and then a bundle.

Every single time, they repel.

Rose gets up. She pushes a button at random. She sets the date _again_ , and she approximates a location _(never did get the hang of that)_ , and she pulls the lever up. She shoves it back down. She gives it her best glare.

“You worked for me before,” she says.

The TARDIS hums, same as it ever did.

“The silent treatment isn’t gonna win you any friends, mate.”

The same hum.

“Sod it.”

Rose shuts her eyes. She tugs at the door to the cage in her mind.

\---

Sometimes, it really is like poking a wolf. 

\---

It happens in Rome, during Caeser’s reign. The Doctor’s notes remain indecipherable, but she can remember snatches of conversation and endless scans, sometimes even the echoes of his one and only foray into her mind. The second meeting on Darlig Ulv Stranden didn’t happen, not really, not so far as the universe is concerned. But the first was a cut that healed naturally, give or take a few impossible stitches. The first was still fresh, raw and pink, and there is plenty of healing still to be done.

She was aiming for Bad Wolf Way. She landed in the middle of an alien invasion.

“So, these monsters,” Rose says.

“Not monsters.” The woman—dark curls, dark skin, dark eyes wide with panic—shakes her head. “Statues. I-I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone, but I can’t do that. I can’t. He’s making himself an army and he’s killed someone. I…” She swallows. “He’s gonna do it again.”

“Hold on. What makes you think it’s an army?”

“I’ve seen them talking, haven’t I? Pygmalion and his statues. He… he’s so angry, Priestess. He’s been so angry for such a long time and I don’t know how to help him.”

“Okay. And he’s killed someone. You’re sure about that?”

They crouch in a stinking alleyway across from a large shack with a thatch roof beside other smaller shacks with thatch roofs, only this one belongs to a murderer and his growing invincible army of stone. The wind hisses through the small space around them. It blows rocks and dirt across the deserted street, carrying yells from nearby pubs. Those people are near enough to be in harm’s way.

“I saw it. He’s a sculptor,” the woman says. “We never made much but now it’s even less. The collector came today and… I know the law, Priestess, I know the, the punishment, but Pygmalion didn’t even wait to hear it. Perhaps the man would be kind. But Pygmalion, he just…”

The woman shuts her eyes.

“What’s your name?” Rose says.

“Galatea.”

“Well, I’m here to help, Galatea. What’s the best way in there?”

The woman shakes her head. Her hands grasp at her dress. “We were gonna have a daughter,” she says. “Elissa, Pygmalion called her. He used to tell me stories about all the things she’d do. All the things she’d love.” She opens her eyes, red and dry. “Don’t kill him, Priestess. He just wanted something I couldn’t give him. No man should die for that.”

Rose takes her hand, and she squeezes it. 

“I’ll do what I can to help, I promise. Now, how do we get into that house?”

\---

There is a back door. Galatea comes in the front to distract her husband, and Rose creeps into the workshop. It’s smaller than she expected. Candlelight flickers past the curtain in the doorway, casting shadows of gray across the blackness. Just barely, she can make out a large table piled high, of shapes across the floor and something skittering away from her foot. No statues. Rose guides herself forward along the wall. She comes to a paper stuck to the surface, one of many, and leans in so close she can practically smell the charcoal. It is a drawing of a man from the side, tall and muscular. Every few meters is another picture, another angle, another powerful arm or torso.

It’s a small miracle she doesn’t trip before reaching the table. 

The Doctor would have his sonic screwdriver ready. Rose runs her hand along the tabletop. Most of the tools are stone, cold and heavy. Nothing that could bring statues to life _(she thinks)_. There is powder everywhere, and it makes her fingers feel dry. About halfway down she touches a stiff sheet of cloth. Rose pauses, and then she pulls it closer. She leans down and runs her hand, her eyes, across its surface, and when she spots a dark splotch, she pulls the cloth up to her face.

She smells copper. 

Rose drops the sheet. A bit nauseous, she turns to the doorway—and that is when she sees the sketches.

It’s luck, really. Some movement in the other room and an additional flicker of light, and suddenly there they are, a whole stack of fake people. Rose picks them up and leafs through.

They are old and dusty, these works, with faces scratched out and mouths that gape. Near the bottom of the stack, muscles give way to smooth arms. Togas begin to drape to the ankles, and the hair grows. In curls, it settles across a woman’s shoulders.

In the next room Galatea screams.

\---

The forge is hot, and it is dark, and Rose can see every single skull-white face, every single skull-smooth hand, ready to crush her windpipe. From across the room Pygmalion yells, and Galatea just looks confused. Confused, and frightened, and—beneath it all—so very sad.

Rose holds the chisel over glowing red coals.

“You can leave,” Rose is saying. “Just go, and I won’t stop you. But there is no way in hell you’re getting this thing back. Tell your stone men to back off, or your days of playing general are over.”

“Get it, you idiots! Take it. Kill her!”

“I’ll drop it. Don’t think I won’t.”

Gripping Galatea’s arm, Pygmalion drags her forward and keeps shouting. Take it, kill her, crush her—the litany of threats is repetitive but real, and as Rose lowers the chisel the heat begins to blisters her skin. She looks at the statues, bracing herself.

They don’t move.

“What’re you doing? Get her!”

Even stone has an instinct for self-preservation, it seems. Once Rose destroys the chisel, their short time of sentience is done.

Rose takes a breath. She wills her fingers to loosen, letting the chisel go, shattering the biothermal bond. She looks past the sculptor, to his wife, and she sees Galatea nod. It’s time.

It is time.

Rose lets her arm fall to her side. 

By her face a stone hand flexes, but it is Pygmalion who rushes forward. It is Pygmalion who stabs her. He twists the blade and the world is reduced to a single, steady heat by her ribs. Rose falls. From the ground all she can smell is sulfur, and she is silent as he steps on her wrist. She watches him take the chisel. It is all she can do just to breathe.

Through the growing darkness, Rose’s eyes meet Galatea’s. The woman holds a hand to her mouth, face smooth as marble. Still, there are no tears.

\---

When Rose wakes, the fires have gone out. Slowly, she pushes herself into a seated position. The world wobbles—or it would, if she could see anything beyond her own fingers. Her mouth feels like the inside of a matchbox, and her toga clings to her skin. Her heart beats just fine.

Rose stands.

She tugs the fabric from her abdomen, and the crust of blood sticks for a moment. Taking a breath, she slips her hand into the gash of cloth.

Her body jerks back. It hurts _(It should hurt)._

_(I’m fine.)_

Rose doesn’t hesitate before running her fingers over the skin. She presses harder. The skin is perfectly smooth and she scratches at it, pushes in and pulls at the flesh and grips as much muscle and fat as she can. It’s all healthy, all clean, nothing but flecks of dried blood from her clothes. 

She’s fine.

\---

Rose returns to Pygmalion’s shop. A statue of a woman with curls to her shoulders stands by the doorway, a broken half of a chisel in each hand. At her feet lies a crumpled heap in the shape of a man. His cries cut through the night like broken glass.

The man looks up, and his face is a mess of dirt and hair and tears and blood. _(He stabbed her with his right hand.)_ He sees her, and he screams. 

“You-you can’t, you’re _dead_.” 

And then, horribly, he scrambles toward her. He grabs onto her, and his nails are sharp against her calves. 

“Goddess, bring her back. Please, I’ll do anything. Anything. Bring her back!”

\---

Later, in new clothes and several glasses of wine past a complete upheaval of space and time, Rose grips the edge of the console. She stares at the emptiness of what was once the time rotor. 

“Right,” she says, “we’ll just stay on this side of the Void then, yeah? I think you proved your point.”

\- - -

On the fifth moon of Rygaelia, Rose gives the people a choice. 

“Look, either you lot stop killing each other or I’ll stop it for you. And you really don’t want to find out what a nova bomb looks like.”

It’s not her best, as far as horrible-interplanetary-war-averting lines go, but she has a dead-man’s switch _(they think)_ and the long-lost ancestor of some peace-making species in the TARDIS. The heads of State are all here, and, grumbling aside, they listen. They have to. Kidnapping can have its advantages, now and again.

When she gets back to the TARDIS, she’ll check the history books. A footnote is fine. A chapter won’t do. Luckily, she can always have a few words with the authors.

It’s fairly simple after that. 

The leaders stand, full of shock and righteous indignation, and Rose adjusts her stance and reaches for the empty inner pocket of her coat. It doesn’t look very empty to them. Because it’s not as if she can march out of this room without finding a laser blast in her back and a war upon her awakening, she reaches inside herself _(just once, just this one time)_ and summons the TARDIS.

The song in her head is blinding. Rose opens her mouth, ready to scream, ready to force compliance, ready to tear apart the windpipes that would declare murder, to gouge out the eyes that would see every shot, every death—the gates clamp shut. 

The TARDIS roars to a rest beside her.

She did not stop herself.

The alien waiting in the control room is telepathic and intensely, frighteningly powerful. Even the Doctor was wary of him, and that didn’t happen often. Looking back, Rose finds it hard to remember it happening at all. The man has negotiated treaties spanning millenia, his work provided the foundation for this universe’s version of the Shadow Proclamation and if he lives another hundred years, it might be the end of warfare as humanity knows it. Rygaelia will take a step towards peace, at least.

_(“I can’t help you,” the alien said, the alien who was perhaps more powerful than a Time Lord. “Anyone who says they can is a liar.”)_

Rose doesn’t particularly want the alien in her TARDIS anymore.

\---

Moscow, 1973. 

The snow is thick and the streets crowded. Patrons and workers walk with hands shoved into their pockets, and occasionally a car creeps forward, headlights on full. It’s not difficult to avoid the crawl of traffic on a day like this. This city could swallow her. The buildings are stone, heavy and permanent, and though many are four stories tall at most, there is a presence to them. A permanence. Ever since she made the decision to keep her promise to a dead man, Rose could not get any closer to modern-day England than this. Maybe the TARDIS senses a kindred spirit here in the endless cold.

Maybe the ship just knows she can’t read Cyrillic.

The cold gnaws at her skin, and Rose steps into the first book shop she can find. It’s small, just a room of shelves and the tang of aged paper, and Rose smiles at the owner as she pulls down her hood. Snow flutters to the ground. There are books set on the front counter, books with woven covers and author’s names splayed proudly, and when she picks one up she mutters the name to herself. She looks at the title, and then she opens to a random page.

English. Thank God. 

The academic texts she would never have noticed, before, sit in the far corner of the room.

\---

Classical conditioning. The concept is simple enough, and Rose doesn’t wait.

It goes like this: you pair a meaningless or ineffectual stimulus with one that is biologically significant and produces the response you want. Gradually you remove the meaningful stimulus, until all that’s left is your hand on the lever. All that’s left is your finger on the buttons you understand, and the ones you experiment with while parked on abandoned planets or in the Vortex. The organism does whatever the meaningful stimulus once prompted it to do.

TARDISes are grown, not built.

Rose tugs at the cage, and she tugs at the controls. She feeds the TARDIS strands of time, and with every success she gives it less, and less.

Rose Tyler trains the TARDIS to live without its Time Lord. It hurts less than it should.

\---

She visits six months after she left, linear time. She never was good at keeping track. It’s September, unseasonably warm, and the sun is already leeching sweat from her pores by the time she makes it across the backyard. The wind skids across the grass, and Ellie’s hair has grown just long enough to make the girl squint. She sits cross-legged by the rose bushes, scuffing her heels across the mulch. Her new red dress already has dirt across the skirt. On her arm crawls her new friend, the caterpillar, and Ellie giggles as the fat, green, and furry critter makes its way to her elbow.

“Hi, mum.”

Rose presses a hand to her lips. She breathes in through her nose. The grass is damp and she couldn’t care less—she sits. “Hi.”

The caterpillar crawls onto Ellie’s sleeve, and then she moves it to her leg. They watch it for a while, a small creature pushing forward, and when it reaches her thigh Ellie lets him crawl onto her fingers. Rose holds out her palm, and the caterpillar trades Tylers.

“Does he have a name?” Rose says.

“Charles.”

“That’s nice.”

“After the Prince.”

“I’m sure he’d be very honored.”

“Grandpa promised he’d tell him. 

“’Course he did.” 

Rose takes the caterpillar from her wrist and places him on her knee. Standing, Ellie straightens out her skirt and brushes off the grass and the mud. She looks up, away from the tasks of presentability, and the girl’s smile fades. 

Ellie Tyler, bashful. Rose blinks as the girl shuffles her feet. 

“Um… Gran says I’m s’posed to hug you.”

“If-if you want.” Rose swallows. “I would like that very much.”

“Can I put Charles home first?”

“Yeah. ’Course.”

Ellie plucks the caterpillar off her mother’s jeans, and she moves some distance away to place him on the leaf of an evergreen hedge. When she walks back, she does so slowly, and Rose waits for her to hold out her arms before she pulls her daughter close. 

Ellie’s body is all sharp edges and elbows (2nd percentile, mum said) just like it was before, just like it’s been for the months and months Rose has been away. Pressing her nose into her daughter’s neck, Rose can smell the sweat and the dirt. The citrus of her shampoo is new, and Rose shuts her eyes. She files the memory away. She pictures it—bright, orange, crunchy. She tries not to think about how long it will last.

“Mummy loves you,” Rose whispers. “Mummy loves you so so much.”

Ellie hugs back, for a while at least, and then she’s squirming and Rose lets go. Rose turns so her hair is between them. Her breath shakes.

“Come to lunch, mum,” Ellie says. “Jenna made biscuits.”

“Okay. You go and mummy’ll be in in a few minutes, okay?”

“’Kay.”

Ellie runs to the kitchen. She runs everywhere.

Rose stays for two weeks, and the ache in her chest tells her it’s too long.

\---

It’s difficult to decipher the readings from the Vortex. 

The walls are her screen and they swirl with numbers and equations, and when she tells the TARDIS to simplify it down _without_ the ever-winding calligraphy of Gallifrey, it’s a bit like straining bricks through a cheese grater.

There has to be a way through.

She floats in the section of the Vortex nearest Bad Wolf Bay, where the walls of reality are thinnest. Not that there _are_ sections of Vortex, or that linear dimensions or physical metaphors have relevance in a place where space and time are condensed into a shimmering pool of eternity, but the approximation is close enough. It’s the best she can manage.

“What if… what if I went back to the beach on that day?” she murmurs to the console. “It’s a fixed point, I think, so I could get a message to him maybe.”

The TARDIS hums beneath her fingers, but it always does that. Even when she is pacing, when she is writing on the walls in marker, when she is cursing the complexity of Gallifreyan and throwing the latest set of wasted hours out the doors, the TARDIS hums.

\---

She lands at the Tyler mansion without giving it much thought. There is a side-door for the staff and she uses it, and she finds herself face-to-face with a red-headed teenager in a tube-top and lipstick that is too dark for her.

“Mum?”

Rose stares.

“Okay, so this exactly what it looks like, but remember last week you said-”

“Go to your room, Ellie.”

“But, mum-”

“Ellie, go!”

Rose knows the effect of a sharp tone. This effect is often not the one you want when it comes to teenagers, but maybe she’s lucky _(Ha)_ because Ellie backs away, and she nods, and she backs away some more, and then she is gone.

\---

She keeps a diary, after that. She falls back on the black pants, purple shirt, black jacket. 

\---

Rose does not materialize on the beach, but she takes a Vespa to the road by the rocks. She sees them, pinpricks in the distance, one hollow and one heavy with grief.

“Fix me, Doctor,” she whispers.

She means it. She means it so desperately it hurts, and if she could claw her way through the cracks in the universe without a Doctor far too young and earnest noticing, she would. She watches until the shapes fade and even the fumes of the Jeep are gone, and then she walks across the beach to the place where a ghost once stood. Rose kneels, and she takes a fistful of dry sand.

It was his choice, that day on the oil rig.

What are choices to her, when the sand doesn’t fall—not a single grain?

\---

There are memorials on Rygaelia. They spring up like fireflies, and they last as only stone can—until the next war, by which time they are faded and forgotten. Rose knows this because she comes back. There is a boy with her, holding her hand. His name is t’Pol’ii. His father died saving him from a monster.

Rose stays with him, that night. She leads him to the faucet, and while he wipes at his arms she covers his father with a sheet. Then, Rose takes him to see the stars. 

New Tripoli and the Central Colony; Pitalia, where the sweets are endless; the last moon of Trill. Sun-skiing on the Highland Comets come next, then Curvus, then Midnight. Poosh. Rose takes him everywhere until he can barely take in all the wonders, until his feet drag over perfect black sand and his eyes droop looking over perfect blue waves, and at night she tucks him in.

\---

He sits playing with a small rubber ball by the TARDIS doors. The pattern of the grating makes any bounce unpredictable, but the Rexi appear to have highly evolved reflexes. Maybe the boy was meant to be a baseball player in another time and place. The ball ricochets past his ear, and he catches it. It ricochets toward the doors, and he catches it.

“t’Pol’ii,” Rose says, “what happened to your mum?”

Bounce, catch.

“She’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

Rose steps around the console. She seats herself some distance away from him. “What do you remember about her?

t’Pol’ii scrunches up his face. “She was tall. I remember running down this road and it was really wet. I think it was raining. I slipped and I hit my knee, and then this woman picked me up. My knee still hurt but I felt a little better.”

“She sounds nice.”

The boy shuts his eyes, and still he doesn’t miss.

“What about your dad?”

He catches the ball, and he stands.

“I want ice cream,” t’Pol’ii says. 

\---

Rose takes him to the Annual Children’s Carnival on Mars, year 3422, and t’Pol’ii sticks to her side as they navigate the coral stalls. The boy scratches at his forehead, and then he takes off the cap he won at the three-dimensional dartboard. “My aunt doesn’t like hats,” he tells her. “She says they make us look too human.”

“Does she? She knows you lot are human, right?” The tentacles across his scalp glisten in the sunlight. “Somewhere in your genetic code, anyway.”

The boy shrugs. Rose sighs and looks skyward.

He takes a bite out of his ice cream cone. “You want my hat?”

\---

Life tends to happen in cycles. For t’Pol’ii, it starts with his mother, who falls victim to the last rumblings of a planet that resents a treaty. _(Over a billion would have died without it, just under a million with. Could a Time Lord have done better?)_ Next is his father, who saves him from something like a bogeyman, something like a creature far from home that feeds off of flesh and fear.

Rose does not tell him where they’re going until they’ve arrived.

He looks at the monument, a stone obelisk surrounded by sheets of glass and covered in laser-carved names. The mist is artificial but thick, swirling at their feet. The boy moves to the closest sheet. It extends so far above him that he squints to see the top, and when he stretches out his fingers Rose puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s shielded.”

He looks up, eyes bloodshot, and she pulls her hand back.

“We’ve been gone for a long time, t'Pol'ii,” she says. “Your aunt’s gonna be worried about you.”

“I don’t care.”

“t’Pol’ii-“

“I don’t _care_.”

Rose pushes her hair behind her ear. She walks back to the obelisk, and she moves her palm across the blank portion of the stone by her waist. A perfect rectangle lights up, seeming to float just off of the surface, and a grid of black dots appear. Like tiny stars they flicker. 

“Rose Tyler,” she says.

Her name burns across the screen, and then it fades into whiteness. A list comes up. The names scroll by quickly, though they pause when she holds out her hand, and she skims through every person, every visitor who chose to mark their presence, until stopping at her own name. t’Pol’ii comes to stand beside her.

“What d’you wanna tell her?” Rose says. “You can leave a message and this machine, this antenna, it’ll broadcast it up there millions and millions of miles into space. It gets far enough away from us and maybe a black hole will catch it and send it back in time. Maybe it’ll even reach your mum.”

“She shouldn’t’ve fought,” he says. “She shouldn’t’ve died. ‘Cause if she hadn’t, then Dad—maybe my dad…” 

The boy chokes on his words, and Rose kneels down. She pulls him close and the boy shoves her away. He puts his hand on the square of light.

“t’Pol’ii,” he manages. “Come back, mum. Please, come back.”

Rose travels through time. The boy looks at her, and he knows.

\---

Rose leave him with his aunt two days after his father’s death—long enough to worry, not quite long enough to assume he’s gone forever. He’s not smiling when she does it, but she remembers the curve of carnivals, the sifting of feet through bare sand. Even children need goodbyes.

\---

Life happens in cycles. You don’t see them until you come back.

\---

She saves Saturn’s Third Station, and she does it without the TARDIS. For once, no one dies.

\---

 

Later, much later, Rose sits on her daughter’s bed. The room is dark and scented with pumpkin spice, the echo of a candle that burnt out some time ago. Ellie is sixteen now. Her arm is thrown over her head, red hair matted around her face, and her genetic code is a complicated sequence of unfamiliar genes that the doctors at Torchwood still can’t decipher. Rose shifts, and her daughter jerks awake.

Ellie blinks at the figure at the end of her bed. “You’re in the jacket.”

“You’re in your jim-jams.”

“That’s ‘cause I’m asleep.”

“Oh, right. I’ll just go then, should I?”

Ellie sits up, rubbing an eye with the heel of her hand. 

“Your gran told me there’s a boy,” Rose says.

“’Course she bloody did.”

“Well look at you, Miss Mouth.”

“Bugger that. Like you’ve never sworn.”

Rose shakes her head. “You wanna run off with him, don’t you?”

“Is that what she’s on about? Last year it was the Vespa.”

“Don’t be like that. She’s worried and you can’t blame her. I ran off with a boy when I was about your age. Can’t say it was the best decision I ever made.”

“Oh please, not again. Jimmy Stone. He left you 800 quid in debt. I know, I know.”

“Gran still hasn’t let that go, has she?”

Ellie fidgets. Rose looks at her hands. 

“There are better people to run off with, Ell’.”

Ellie’s breath catches. The air in the room sizzles against the bars of gold _(even the cage is gilded, now)_ within her, and the air between Rose’s hip and her daughter’s side is hot and pulsing. 

There is Time Lord here.

Rose stands. Ellie says, “I-I’ve got school.”

“Yeah. School’s important.

“I mean I’d love to—to go off with you and travel, I mean, but I can’t. I can’t. If you were offering, that is.”

“Yeah, right, silly of me, sorry.”

Rose is at the door, and her hand is on the handle, and it’s a minor miracle she hasn’t tripped over anything.

“Mum, I lo-”

The door shuts. Rose all but runs down the halls. 

Let her go off with a boy. Let her go off with Jimmy Stone and his alternate bike, his alternate grin, and she’ll call Pete every day begging for money until she gets her head on straight. She’ll make something of herself, afterward. She’ll have some sort of future.

Because it was just the same, there on the Oil Rig, and on the Nowhere Plain, and so many times when she just told herself she was tired or she wanted him. That it was all in her head. The Vortex craves its Time Lord. When he is half-empty, when only one heart beats, it roars against its confines until it takes everything—every lock, every muzzle, every ounce of will—to stop its escape. 

A trade, her life for his, only now he’s gone because he chose for them. Only now there is just one little girl, one single strand of Time Lord DNA, left in this universe.

The bars are gilded now. Gold is easier to break.

\---

Rose is probably close to 80 _(70? 100?)_ when the TARDIS gives her something she can use. She’s bent over the tiny interface she was able to cobble together from a touch-screen tablet and wires of an alloy not found on Earth. Her neck aches, not that she notices, and she shoves her hair out of her face and mouths the numbers to herself.

Rose scrambles to her feet. 

“Can you do it?” she says to the console. “Something that precise, I mean.” 

Stupid question. Of course it can. With a Time Lord at the helm who understands every squeak and shudder, anyway. Or, with the help of raw Vortex energy, routed through a human consciousness. 

The cage would be gone.

Rose breathes in through her nose. Her head hurts.

She thinks of Rome.

“I wouldn’t kill myself,” she says to no one in particular. She saw everything, at that moment. Rose, the Bad Wolf, knew everything. Could do everything. “I wouldn’t.”

Wolves are known for their survival instincts. She knows this not because she’s read it, or because she’s heard it. Rose knows because there is something of the wolf about her, and that something is ready to feed. She has been ever since she died for the first time and woke and remembered. On some level, ever since a teenage girl committed genocide in the name of love.

Rose is the Wolf, more or less. She wouldn’t hurt herself. She couldn’t.

If she succeeds, the Wolf will die.

Rose circles the console, pressing buttons and twisting dials, calibrating as precisely as she can with a trained TARDIS. She keeps pressing and twisting, long after the settings are perfect, long after a simple flip of a switch sends the TARDIS lurching. 

She rights it. She rights herself, and she stares at the empty air.

All this time, and Rose doesn’t want to die. 

“Wish me luck,” she mutters.

A crescendo howls in the distance. Rose takes hold of the bars, molten beneath her hands, and screaming she pries them apart.

\---

Creation suffocates. 

Every bone, sinew, and muscle; every nucleus and nucleotide; every atom is pried open and the empty space filled, shoved apart and packed tighter and tighter until she is heavy as a pit of iron. Rose is the core of the Earth and the molten rock around it, she screams and the cry is water that crashes past cliffs, the wind of an asteroid belt, and Rose has forgotten how to move. She extends a hand, and the sun flares. She breathes, and a black hole swallows a dying galaxy.

Rose Tyler is frightened. A part of her laughs.

“Rose.”

She opens her eyes. 

The light is blinding. It’s not white, exactly, because color does not exist here. Nothing is sharp, nothing hits her retina and tells her the shape of things, but still she squints against the burning of her eyes. This is what the human mind can manage. Rose Tyler stands, and she finds herself.

The Wolf is eighteen with hair so long she looks like a child. Her jeans are pale and tight, her sweater red with a hood and the future on its back. She bleeds gold from every pore.

“Hello,” Rose says. 

“Rose Tyler.” The Bad Wolf grins. “I could crush you into atoms.”

“Yeah. You could.”

“You are not frightened?”

“Terrified. ‘S why you have to go.”

The Wolf circles her. “That’s what we believe now, isn’t it? That I will swallow you.”

“Or worse.”

“Worse?” She cocks her head. “Oh, yes. The Time Lord daughter. We could save her, you and I.”

“Save her?”

“She will die. I am the Bad Wolf. I do not let my children die.”

“She’s fine without you, thanks.”

The Wolf’s voice echoes. “We live to save the Time Lord.”

“He’s dead.” Rose grits her teeth—she has to, even after all these years, to talk about it. “He’s didn’t want… he didn’t want this. Our daughter doesn’t need you.”

“We live-”

“Ellie _does not need you_.” Rose takes a breath. “I want to go back. Can you do that? Will you?”

“I can.”

“You’ll die. I’ve got to tell you that, ‘cause it’s the truth. You’ll go back to the Vortex, forever.”

“No, Rose Tyler. I will cease, and you will be incomplete.”

\---

A woman sits on the swings. They’re old, these swings, and a bit rubbish—too tall for a child, too short for an adult. The paint on the chains has chipped away to reveal the metal, and Rose remembers the chill of it beneath her fingers. It squeaks with every swing.

Eyes shut, barely more than a baby, Ellie sits on her mother’s lap. Her cheek rests against Rose’s chest. Dully, she kicks her feet in the autumn air.

_(Time has paths.)_

Rose’s hand slackens _(it didn’t, it never did)_. Twenty-two months after the birth and she can sleep anywhere, and Ellie does not slide so much as topple to the ground. The woodchips have been cleared out from beneath the swing and there’s a rock, and who knew Time Lord children could bleed so much?

\---

There is a woman. 

Her father fought in the war and she has his rifle, now illegal, hidden beneath her bed. Her bastard of a husband hits her one time too many, but her aim is poor and the gun is powerful. In another universe, perhaps the bullet wouldn’t scream through the air in quite the same way. In another universe, Ellie might be safe. 

\---

Rose is never particularly careful when crossing the street.

\---

Every little worry and Rose sees the truth of it, sees the circumstances that might have conspired to hurt their daughter and every contrivance, every bit of luck and delays in shoe-tying, that kept them safe. It was not Rose that checked in on Ellie in the middle of the night. It was not Rose who fretted over the girl’s first trip in the TARDIS at the ripe old age of three years, two months, though it was she who found the girl when she wandered off. Ellie was crouching in a pile of leaves behind the blue box, and when Rose snatched her up, the girl couldn’t stop giggling.

Her mother would find her. Ellie had no doubt about that.

Rose was by no means a careless mother, but the seven months of pregnancy never concerned her, though Ellie’s first cough—which worsened quickly—did. She never felt the need to teach Ellie how to use a sonic to open locked doors, but she pointed out which cabinets should be deadlocked after the Doctor walked their daughter through the process, just in case.

Somehow, she knew when to worry and when not to. Somehow, Rose just always knew.

\---

Before Rose kneels the Bad Wolf.

“If we’re done reminiscing,” Rose says, “there’s the matter of you getting the hell out of me.”

“Did you never wonder, Rose, why raising a Time Lord child was so simple? She rarely fell, and when she did, you caught her. She wandered away on another planet, and you found her within minutes. At Torchwood, your father removed the dangerous men long ago.”

“You’re saying that was you?”

“There is no me, Rose Tyler. There is us. 

“No.” She pushes herself to her feet. “No, he took you out of me. Most of you, anyway. He locked you up and threw away the key. You couldn’t… you couldn’t do anything. A human body can’t handle that. The Doctor said…”

Beneath her, the nothingness shakes, the echoes of distant bangs and shrieks shuddering through her. The TARDIS sits at the cusp of the Void, and it was not designed to survive that. Nothing is. Not even time.

The Wolf’s smile is almost kind. 

“You cannot touch the Vortex without being changed, Rose Tyler. Time Lords are not always right.”

The Wolf cups her cheek, and the touch is the strike of lighting. Rose gasps. She has become thunder, she rips through rain-strewn valleys and the ears of mortals, and she could snap every war in creation with her teeth.

The Wolf’s hand moves away, and Rose Tyler is still alive.

“I can’t control you.”

“You will.”

“But the Doctor… I told him I’d get rid of you. I promised.”

“Saviors are subjective. I gave myself a choice.”

Rose stays silent. Time is nothing here, in theory, but somewhere a bell begins to clang.

“Will you take me back?”

“Yes.”

“And what’ll happen to this universe, if I go?”

“It will move forward, unprotected.” The Wolf’s voice is mocking. “Our daughter doesn’t need you.”

“Don’t. Just don’t.” Rose steps forward, and her legs tremble. “Give me your hand.”

\---

On a world still convinced of its solitude, during the reign of the child emperor Caesar, a man named Pygmalion loses the woman he loves to his own ego. This ego created her but there are limits to power, barriers to put up even within your own heart, and he did not know this. Now, he does. Now, the knowledge will fester in his synapses for as long as he lives, even if Galatea’s fingers were to flutter to life once again.

Rose knows his thoughts and his future, just as she knows that her eyes blink, her heart beats. She is the Wolf. The facts of this universe simply are.

Rose and the Wolf stand in the middle of the road, bathing the night in a pale golden glow. Pygmalion lies curled up at his wife’s feet, sobbing—Rose should arrive at any moment. _(Paradoxes, he always said…)_ Rose doesn’t move, her heart leaden, and when Pygmalion looks over, somewhere the clock stutters.

“You,” he says, “you can’t. You’re _dead_.”

He gapes for a time, and then he crawls over. He grabs onto the Wolf’s legs, pulls at her calves—gasping, he lets go.

The Wolf does not touch him.

“Goddess, bring her back. Please, I’ll do anything. Anything. Bring her back!”

Rose’s palm burns as the Wolf turns to her. “Do I save her?”

“Do you want to?”

“Time does not want.”

“Time shouldn’t lie.”

The Wolf’s eyes snap towards the torn body, and for the first time, she seems uncertain. “Galatea would be human and she would never die,” she says. “Life and death cannot coexist in a single vessel.”

“What would it look like, a universe where nobody died?”

The Wolf looks, and Rose knows.

“Oh,” Rose says.

The hand gripping Rose tightens, so sharp and so quick Rose almost doesn’t recognize the heat until she smells the searing of her own flesh. She cries out, but she clenches her teeth and she makes them both, the Wolf and Rose Tyler, stare at this future. She makes them see every life, every plea piled atop pain unending. She makes them watch the choices people make and the choices they consider and, silently, she asks, _Is this what we want?_

Somewhere, a boy clings to his father’s torn flesh, still alive even after his bones have cracked in nearly a dozen places. t’Pol’ii sits in living blood. He looks up, and he sees Rose, and his eyes widen. A voice in his father’s throat rasps, “Don’t go.”

On her knees, barely breathing, Rose pulls away.

\---

Whiteness. Unbearable nothingness, the shell between her and reality as the greatest ship in the universe teeters on the brink of collapse.

“You have to promise,” Rose hisses, her body shaking. She can barely see through her tears and the pain, but the Wolf did as she asked. The Wolf looked. The Wolf stopped. “Promise me I can handle it.”

“I do not promise. I act.”

“Then take me back! Kill me, for all I care. But you can’t have this world.”

“Rose. We already do.

Rose shakes her head. Careful not to use her hands, she pushes herself to her feet and meets her own stare.

“Choose, Rose Tyler,” the Bad Wolf says. “To return and die, or to live as you are. The consequences are your own. Choose.”

\---

Oil rigs do not change much over the years. The wind whips at her face, her clothes, and when she ducks past the crisscross of metal supports, she is met by the familiar sight of ocean—blue as crystal, shimmering beneath the sunlight as far as the eye can see. The waves were calm, once, but now they crash against each other like battalions. Three levels up the spray is sharp and cold. The walkways screech and when she falls, the railing knocks the breath out of her. She chokes on the fumes.

Rose shuts her eyes.

She can feel it running through her, _Time_. The knowledge of her state and every other, just a moment ago. She moves the nerve impulses back eight seconds. Just fine now, she pushes herself off of the railing. She moves on into the depths of the facility, metal plating and construction-yellow bulkheads guiding her west. With every step, she senses a much younger Rose Tyler running across the catwalks below. She rounds a corner, nearly burning herself on a hot water pipe, and the Rose down below tosses the Doctor a sonic screwdriver. She lurches down the stairs and takes the narrowest walkway, and that Rose reloads her experimental firearm.

She slides down a quaking metal support. She presses her fingers to her eyelids. On the lower level, on the other side of the rig, Rose Tyler doesn’t get there soon enough. The Doctor puts himself between the Dalek and the drill controls, and he waits for the shot. 

The waves do not stop. The screech of steam does not go silent. Time continues on.

Rose sits until she senses, rather than hears, the roar of the helicopter. She mouths Jake’s words to herself. She hears what Mickey’s would have sounded like and, had circumstances been different, her own shouts from the helicopter to a man who wouldn’t answer. Goodbyes reverberate through her vocal chords.

When the Rose Tyler below screams, she runs.

She arrives at the body six and a half minutes before the first explosion. He looks different—even now, even with all her knowledge. Rose has forgotten the stubble on his chin. She has forgotten its scratch, and the smooth press of the brown suit against her palm. The air shimmers with an electric smell, and something worse.

Kneeling, Rose takes his hand, still warm, and presses it to her chest. His fingers slot around hers. She can’t help the kiss she presses to his knuckles, and only when his body blurs does she realize that she’s crying.

 _About bloody time_ , her mum would say.

Three minutes. 

Two minutes, forty-three seconds. 

Rose’s blood has synchronized itself to the passage of the universe, and when she folds the Doctor’s arms over his chest, she knows it is past time.

He was a man of the universe, her Doctor. He lost his world and then he lost it again, he lost the calm of the Vortex and the stars beyond the horizon, and when he was not rushing about the planet saving it, he was pulling together the means to take them upward. The Doctor laid down roots, and he reached for another world’s sun.

For the last time Rose puts her hand over the Doctor’s, and she lets him go.

The Doctor’s atoms shimmer in the air. Kneeling beside empty space she watches the journey, the banana groves on the other side of the planet and the stars swallowed by a black hole, the pathways of atoms that do not crumble and some that do until one, just one, finds its way across the impossibility of the cosmos. Back to another universe, past a time lock, to settle with its people.

It’s worth a smile, that future. The impossible may be dangerous, but it’s what he would have chosen. It’s what the Doctor deserves. 

Rose falls forward. Her palms slap the floor. She holds her breath because that is what you do, when dealing with atoms. You hold yourself inward so that journeys can continue, untouched.

The explosion tastes of copper. 

Her tongue is cut, though intact, and when the alarms blare and the lights flash her instinct is to curl up. She slips downward, a little. Rose feels heavy, and tired. Holding her head up is an effort. Her eyelids ache with every blink. She won’t ever do this again, she knows—maybe the disruption of quantum physics takes too much out of her, or maybe she knows this is a power no one should have. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

The Bad Wolf is not omnipotent anymore. That’s probably a good thing. 

Rose exhales and thinks of the past. She takes her thoughts back to a moment before her limbs felt like lead, and she convinces her body to agree.

\---

When Ellie Tyler was a little girl, her mother went away. She had lost her father sometime previously—dead, her mum said, and even though she wasn’t quite sure what that meant she cried. She wasn’t a crier, Ellie. She scraped her knee, and she screamed for precisely the time it took for someone to come running. A boy at daycare took her favorite markers, and she said nothing. The teacher called home after she convinced him the dirt outside was fairy dust and if he didn’t return every single thing he’d ever taken from anybody, the fairies would take him away and never bring him back.

The night of the Doctor’s funeral service, Ellie began cutting off her hair with safety scissors. Rose came in half-way and finished the job. 

Ellie sits on the couch beside her grandmother, the cushions so plush she’s nearly swallowed. She peeks out, and then she presses her face back into Jackie’s side. 

“You’re not gonna find much in there, sweetheart,” Jackie says, “Ellie, sit up, go on. Look who’s here. It’s your mum.”

Seated on the glass table across from them, Rose says, “I brought you something.” 

At her feet is a knapsack, beaten and faded. She reaches in, pushes aside the journal, and takes out a small cardboard box. Rose waits for Ellie to look out, to sit up and crane her neck, before taking off the lid.

On top of two leaves, one blue and one evergreen, crawls a caterpillar. Rose found him on a planet where the larval cycle lasts thirteen months. The butterflies there are as loyal as dogs.

“Rose!” Jackie says. “You can’t just bring a bug in here. That’s unhygienic, that is. Think of the bacteria reproducing on that thing.”

“Relax, mum. Most of them aren’t lethal.” 

Ellie pushes herself forward to the edge of the cushion. She looks at Rose, and then she turns to her grandmother. “She smells funny.”

“Ellie! That’s no way to talk to your mum.”

“’S true.”

“I don’t care if it’s written in the stars. Ella Susan Tyler, your mother raised you better than that.”

“No, it’s okay,” Rose says. “I probably feel a bit weird, huh? ‘S my fault, but it was the only way I could get back to you. Sorry if I’m a bit scary.”

Ellie stares at her. Her eyes flick to the box. 

“Wanna holds him?” Rose says.

Eyes wide, Ellie nods. Rose slides down onto the floor and hands the box over, and Ellie’s nose and the caterpillar’s fuzzy body wriggle close to one another. Just barely, they touch.

“Enough of that.” Cringing, Jackies takes the box and shuts it. Ellie hops off of the couch.

“I’ve got a promise to make,” Rose says. “D’you wanna hear it?”

Ellie doesn’t nod, but she looks.

“I’m back for good, and I’m gonna stay, yeah? You’re stuck with me for good. Think you can handle that?”

Ellie cocks her head. She hums—a faint, quiet sound.

Suddenly, she grabs her mother by the hand.

“I wanna go on the TARDIS,” she says.

“Why’s that?”

“’Cause if you leave again, I wanna go with you.”

Rose takes a breath, and as the air rushes through her throat she realizes there is no hunger here. Time ticks forward, every heartbeat something to be rewritten, but the little girl holding her hand is just a little girl holding her hand. There is just Ellie, her Ellie, holding on.

\---

Rose Tyler stays, and sometimes she leaves, and always she comes back for tea. There are grandchildren. Second cousins. Friends. Sometimes, nothing but the rain of the stars traces her steps, and it is then that she finds the places where even time can be surprised. 

Rose Marion Tyler lives her life.


End file.
